JavaScript – Simple, Intuitive & Promising

Web development is an area of immense interest to me. Having been in this field for over 3 years now, I look back at the time I ventured into this field for the first time during my college days for some academic project. As with any newbie, I started with HTML and CSS with an intention to design a simple login page. Designing a “Login Page” is akin to writing a “Hello World” program.

It started off pretty well and I was able to get the login page designed in no time. Once I got the hold on HTML & CSS, my curiosity increased manifold and now I wanted to add a “Home Page” which is to be shown once the login details are successfully authenticated. I was hence introduced to JavaScript and backend programming with PHP.

Slowly but steadily, I learnt that JavaScript is much more than just “DOM Manipulations” or “Client Side Scripting Language” – terms often used in many of the blogs and websites. I learnt that:-

There were plenty of libraries & frameworks built over JavaScript. jQuery was the one of the most popular and widely used library.

The libraries were developed to ease the development, in a way by creating an abstraction which meant writing less code than writing the same in Vanilla JavaScript. (Vanilla JavaScript is a term used to describe plain/pure JavaScript code).

Anyone could create a library with ease to fit their needs.

JavaScript, lately had been widely used as a server-side script too.(Read nodejs)

Tons of libraries and frameworks are being written as I write this article.

JavaScript had an Object-Oriented face too. (Read more on this blog by Douglas Crockford).

JavaScript’s popularity is underlined by the fact that it is the second most popular language on Stackoverflow in terms of number of questions asked, with Java being at the top.

Having learnt these, I knew JavaScript had an immense potential. It was the crux of modern web and app development. Be it Small Applications or complex Enterprise Applications, JavaScript was at the heart of it all.

To start with, JavaScript is unlike other conventional programming language. After all, it wasn’t meant to be that way either. Introduced to the world as a client side scripting language, it grew manifolds and gained wide acceptance as a language for web development.